Ballet Dancing and How Natalia Bessmertnova Started Out!

Russian ballet dancing owes a lot to Natalia Bessmertnova.
She was born in Moscow on the 19th of July 1941.
At that time Russia was deep in the war against Nazi Germany, and 1941 was a particularly hard year.
Natalia was taken to the safety of Leninabad in Central Asia soon after she was born, while her father had to serve as a doctor for the soldiers of war.
The family was reunited shortly before the end of the war and her childhood was spent in Moscow, where she grew up in a secure and stable environment.
She had a lot of affection and attention as a child, and her parents brought her up as normally as possible, even when her exceptional talents became obvious.
She was a helpful, hard-working and considerate child and helped tremendously when her sister Tatiana was born in 1947.
Natalia's ballet dancing bordered on compulsion, and she would dance to any music for hours on end.
Eventually Natalia's parents realised that she was born to dance and her mother took her for lessons at the city's Young Pioneer Palace, which was a cultural club for children that was found in every Soviet City.
The classes were run by Helena Rosse who was an ex-ballerina and experienced teacher.
She was a strict teacher and a stickler for punctuality, and no mistake would escape her watchful eye.
She advised Natalia's parents to let her audition for the Moscow Ballet School.
Out of 300 applicants, Natalia alone was admitted without reservations.
Among the school's teachers of classical dance, Maria Kozhukhova and Sophia Golovkina played a significant part in the development of Natalia Bessmertnova's dancing.
Between the two of them, they laid the groundwork for her virtuoso technique.
Natalia Bessmertnova made her debut on the Bolshoi stage on the 20th of June 1961 when she was still a student.
She danced in the Seventh Waltz in Chopiniana.
She took somebody else's part at the last minute, and had to come on stage without having rehearsed her part.
She still managed to dance with full abandon and youthful enthusiasm and succeeded in winning the admiration of the audience, thus accelerating her career immediately.
She graduated form the Moscow Ballet School with an almost unheard of Grade A1 and was immediately accepted into the Bolshoi Ballet Company.
She had just turned twenty and her steep rise to stardom had now officially begun.
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